AT KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS
Excavations, Destruction, and Accumulation
Clive Knights and Andrea Burgay each engage in atypical collage making processes to make work that engages with ideas about culture. Knights has recently begun to explore the potency of light-ray excavation. An LED light table allows the exploration of collage relationships through the depth of layered images, as well as across the surface. “I revel in fragmented graphic experience and, through the transformative power of metaphor where likeness is discovered in things that differ, I configure a new familiarity with the world in the visual synthesis of the emergent collage,” said Knights. He will present the collage process: light-ray excavation. He describes his art practice, “I make collages as a poet composes a poem; taking phenomena already laden with a meaning spawned by their existing contribution to everyday life, and re-awakening them through new configurations and alliances. As the poet borrows words from the general milieu and re-casts their relationships, so I borrow images and materials and perform a similar poetic act.” Burgay’s work “reveals cycles of growth, deterioration and rebirth, religious ideals of transcendence and a belief in the magic of the everyday.” She approaches collage as “a creative means to sort through chaos, extract value and arrange fragments into new forms. The collage process unifies a variety of materials from different contexts as a driving force.” Her recent work “seeks to negate a hierarchy of visual imagery by elevating and transforming discarded materials. Using found and vintage paper ephemera whose original relevance has been lost or abandoned, I integrate the past histories of these objects into the present. Their disintegration and decay speaks of the passage of time and the possibility of redemption for the obsolete.” Using the physical act of art making as a point of departure, Burgay and Knights will lead a conversation around the idea that metaphor is necessary to the vitality of culture and how collage embodies this theory.
About Kolaj Fest New Orleans
Kolaj Fest New Orleans is a multi-day festival and symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society, July 10-14, 2019. Visit the website to learn more, see an overview of the program, and register to attend. Kolaj Fest New Orleans would not be possible without the support of Press Street, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, LeMieux Galleries, Mystic Krewe of Scissors and Glue, Antenna Gallery, Kolaj Magazine and Kasini House. Kolaj Fest New Orleans is made possible through a generous gift from Laurie and Doug Kanyer. WEBSITE
About Clive Knights
Based in Portland, Oregon, Clive Knights is a collage artist and printmaker, as well as a Professor of Architecture and the Director of the School of Architecture at Portland State University. For over three decades, he has deployed collage techniques in his teaching as a way of teasing out imaginary settings with depth and character from the flatness of a sheet of paper. He has exhibited his collages, monotypes and architectural drawings internationally since inclusion in the 1985 Venice Biennale. National venues have included Tacoma Museum of Art and participation in juried group shows at galleries and art centers across sixteen states. His article, “Stranger at the Studio Table”, about architecture and collage was published in Kolaj #17. His work was also included in Collage Artist Trading Cards, Pack 5, Cut Me Up #2, and Oltre Collage Fanzine #3. See and learn more on Instagram @knightsclive and at www.cliveknights.com
About Andrea Burgay
Andrea Burgay is a visual artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Burgay’s work combines collage, sculpture and found materials to elevate the overlooked and the mundane via transformative physical processes. Adding and removing layers of handmade and found materials presents a physical manifestation of the passage of time, destruction and decay. Burgay is the founder of Cut Me Up, a participatory collage magazine that mimics musical call and response in visual form. More about Andrea Burgay and her work is on her Kolaj Magazine Artist Directory page and at www.andreaburgay.com.
Images (top to bottom):
Collage by Clive Knights
Collage by Clive Knights
Collage by Andrea Burgay